You write quite entertainingly.
There’s no room for luck in the “realistic” half of your diagram.
siclabomines
Karma: 79
My intuition is that the effect of the most infectious people getting infected first is even bigger than you suspect. It will not be herd immunity what brings this under control. Herd immunity would be if the infected person has a harder time infecting because some are immune already, and that requires some significant % of people being immune (unless it’s juuuuust R=1.04 or something very near 1 but bigger, too much of a coincidence). Yet most countries got it under control at low %s with either lots or little action (even when at first many of the same countries seemed unable to affect the spread with anything short of total lockdown).
It seems much more reasonable that as the virus selectively removes the most susceptible, the R drops below 1 and that’s it. The proportion of removed could be at 1%, 0.5%, 5%, no problem here. Argentina is having a spike despite being in lockdown for months, because they locked down too early, I think because the virus refuses to be tamed until it has eaten up “those” communities.
Regarding the rate being ~1, I share the suspicious attitude, but something doesn’t feel right in suggesting the control mechanism is people’s behaviour. Maybe there’s something else. Or maybe there isn’t even a control mechanism (one that slows the spread if the “next generation of infected is bigger and viceversa”), but the dynamics are is just not behaving naturally like an exponential. Maybe there’s a “cap” of how many peoplee can get infected per 2 weeks because not that many (accidentally?) commit one of the “high-risk” things you suggest. Or the connection graph between people is shaped in a way that tends to this linear thing. I don’t know.
I’ve been mostly using a mix
vimwiki for the Babble
TeXMacs for the Prune
Anki as a bucket for short insights, with very good retrievability (from PC and phone): click “browse”, and search. (I don’t use it as much to memorize, though I really like to just be able to pop something out without noticing the ever growing mess, yet knowing that everything will EVENTUALLY come out. Also, I love to be able to easily set if I want to see the card again sooner or later. Honestly, I wish these kinds of systems weren’t limitted to “memorization apps”, and didn’t try to be so automatic in their scheduling of the pieces of content.)
Occasionally, Freeplane for mindmaps. jrnl for quick and short date-stamped logs. Probably others...
I am not too satisfied though, so this post will be useful when I have the time to give it another shot.
Given the news cycle speed, it makes sense to get ready for the likely scenarios.
Make a captcha with GPT-X rationalist content against real rationalist content. If you can’t tell the difference, you are out :P
Also, train GPT-X on content that triggers mobs, and then use it to keep them busy elsewhere :P
Simply requiring log-in to read some posts, and limiting the rate of new users (maybe even make it invite only most of the times, like a private torrent tracker), should go a long way to prevent mob attacks.
Of course, that was a given. I just assumed that most of us don’t need days of exclusive focus to write an email.
I still don’t get it. agc asked how is the retaliation NOT at attempt to stifle criticism. TurnTrout answered that it is not: it’s retaliation for a doxing attack, not for criticism. Then wolflow said something that’s “literally” wrong, and metaphorically I didn’t get it; probably TurnTrout didn’t get it too so he answered the literal interpretation. Etc etc.
But the upvotes-downvotes show I’m not seeing something here.
Fair enough.
I was 80% kidding. I do believe that the type of people that could attack this community are hugely people that can’t tolerate trying to read and understand the kind of content in here; let alone Scott’s 999999 word analytical yet clear essays. They didn’t sign up for real thinking and nuance when they went into activism.
And unlike others, I don’t think mobs are organized. They look like it, but its some sort of emergent behaviour that can be managed by making it boring for the average mob member to attack.
I meant hiding just the CWish posts. There’re enough non-CWish posts to attract people that value the way of thinking in general.
Also, it doesn’t sound that bad to attract users through 1 to 1 recommendations only. Or allow unlogged people to read all, but only little by little release the power for new users to interact with the content. Maybe release it all at once if a high karma user vouches for you (they lose it that person gets banned or something). Maybe instead of karma, there could be another value that better reflects how much you are likely to value proper manners and thinking (e.g., it could be obtained by summing karma from different topics
iin a way that overvalues breadth of interest ).I’m just thinking out loud in real time. My main point one can go a long way just by limiting the rate at which new users can invade and screw with the content.
I have the opposite impressions. Science should embrace causality more and do it better. And as a layman term it should be refined so that we stop talking about the causes of any event as a cake where each slice has a name and only one name.
I find it hard to summarize why, at least right now, but my view is sorta similar to Pearl’s (though I don’t totally like how he puts it). Hopefully later I’ll re-read this more attentively and comment something more productive (if no one has done a strictly better job already).
Why is it that riskier investments should give higher expected returns?
I ask not because I don’t get that the avg person would rather invest on something safe than something unsafe, all else being equal. I get that. I ask because I imagine that investors could bring their total risk down through diversification without harming the expected returns, so big money would prefer the higher expected returns even if they are risky, and in doing that, they’d bring down the extra returns from the riskier investments.
Is it because investments options are so correlated that diversification isn’t enough to bring the risk of a portfolio down to acceptable levels? Or some other reason?
Do they really get higher expected returns from that?
I know they do when the market isn’t efficient (relative to the specific investor), but that doesn’t help me.
It’s the placebo effect, obviously; you can’t get sick if you zinc it works.
I doubt that kind of hidden information can affect PredictIt betting odds as it limits the amount each person can bet.
There is bias or Zvi is reaching wrong conclusions with the same info.
I think I disagree a bit with both (but what do I know).
For someone like Jeff Bezos, an increase in spending on Item A probably just results in slightly less money spent by his great-grandchildren in 100 years.
This doens’t seem to me to be the right way to think about it. Short term, the more he spends on Item A will result in lower spending on Item B, or lower investment in his companies, a lower transfer of money from him to someone else (like through lower savings). Or more money being spent overall if he just uses up cash he had hidden in his pillow; which increases prices for everyone (but this will be made up for in some future).
If we want to make sure that the starving guy gets some of the food, can’t we just allocate the food to him directly, rather than having to give him enough money to win a bidding war with Jeff Bezos?
Who produces the food and can set the prices? If it’s private companies, then they wouldn’t sell it to the state for cheaper than to Bezos, so it would be as expensive to the state as giving that same money to the poor and let them outbid Bezos. If the state owns the stuff, then [insert standard anti-socialism arguments]. If the prices are fixed by the state, then its inefficient and there may not enough production for all. If the prices fixed by the state but depend on the person—or on how many of X you have bought this month or stuff like that—then that introduces whole new types of messes.
Yeah, I wasn’t trying to be tautological.
I am under the impression that you are thinking something like: “Bezos has ~100 billion to spend. If he spends 1 million in X, then he has 1 million less to spend on the rest. But he won’t even get to spend it in his lifetime, so that extra million in X doesn’t change how much he would spend in Y. Therefore, it’s wrong to say that Y will become more available because Bezos spent in X.”.
I don’t think that’s the right way to think about all this. (Warning: oversimplification coming):
Bezos earns some income, say, in a year. Almost all of it will be spent. Most will be invested and not consumed, so it will still increase his net worth, but that demand for stuff is still there, affecting the economy. Bezos is already probably spending about as much as he can, and what he is not spending he is saving which probably means transferring it to someone else who will spend it. So, if he spends USD 10 in X, it’s reasonable imho to “expect” the economy to get USD 10 less spending in non-X stuff (on avg)
So one should interpret the points as a measure of how useful you’ve been to the overall predictions in the platform, and not how good you should be expected to be on a specific question, right?
I think the calculus is correct, in the “non-iterated” game. The conclusion is correct in the same sense that it would be even better to donate $101 and come back the next day with a black sock on your head and steal a widget.
There’s just something about the iterated exercise of mixing up donations and transactions that you don’t like, and I share that intuition. I think in my case I feel that their strategy of selling at a high price discourages other potential transactions from people that value the widget between $20 and $100 and don’t care about who’s selling it. And I am particularly sensitive about taking advantage of the simple win-win opportunities first. Or maybe I just dislike the lack of transparency of dressing up the donation as a purchase.
In my experience for many people it’s the other way around. Many are much more willing to buy some useless product at a high price, a product that they value less than its producing cost, instead of just donating. I assume it’s because they feel it’s better to pay someone that’s “working” for their money than to incentivize begging.